Lino Mannocci
Cloud Paintings
1 March - 7 April 2005

The sea links many of the themes in Lino Mannocci's art. It plays a central role in Stories from the Sea, Bonfires and Other Stories and now Cloud Paintings, the titles of three recent exhibitions. The cloud is fugitive by nature. It softens and alters light, it obscures forms, shrouding great architectural or geographic silhouettes, only to reveal them by moving on, evaporating into pure air.  Mannocci's clouds touch on new as well as familiar themes in this exhibition. Through a window frame, they cascade into a room, or they hover sumptuously over a grand Rennaissance arcade; they partly envelop a suspended figure in the sky ­ a crucifix? Ganymede? ­ and they gather behind small scarlet figures 'stencilled' in classical poses against their elusive, vaporous background.

While Mannocci is not interested in anecdote, as Andrew Lambirth pointed out in 1999, 'he retains an unswerving and very personal involvement with narrative at the service of his art. History is here, and imagination, as well as man's physical nature. Nor does Mannocci neglect the soul . . . . There is a metaphysical factor at work, quietly active, like yeast, which we should acknowledge without striving to define it.'

Paint is applied meticulously with small touches, smoothed down to remove any evidence of the brush. The rough jute on which he works is buried beneath the paint, though often it is left thinly washed as a border or a frame, setting the picture within a picture. These are beautiful works of great subtlety, luminous, silent, meditative and as evocative as they are enigmatic.

Mannocci has been exhibiting in Italy and the UK for twenty five years. Work may be found in The British Museum, The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, the Altonaer Museum, Hamburg, the Jenish Museum, Vevey and the W. Hack Museum, Ludwighaffen. Key exhibitions have been accompanied by distuingished catalogues, most recently Fenomenologia Della Metacosa an exhibition curated in 2004 by Philippe Daverio in Spazio Oberdan, Milano.